Dance: the latter years

When I was 20 years old, I moved to the city proper: San Diego. San Diego had a top private dance school called “Stage 7.” I would take classes whenever I could, they cost $6.50 per class. But, during the summer, I was good enough to win a full scholarship. And I would take up to 4 classes a day, as you can see circled in the 1985 schedule, plus rehearsals on the weekends. We always put on a performance at the end of the summer. My dancing skills improved remarkably with this training, I was at my best at age 23. But I never got any pictures taken of myself during these years…

Stage 7 is still in existence, see their website here.

1985 Stage 7 Rehearsal Schedule

Stage 7 brochure from 1989, this is how good the dancers there were. I danced with many of those pictured.

Around this time, I injured my big toenail on my left foot by dancing in a new pair of pointe shoes which were too hard compared to my soft beat-up pair. My toenail was a little too long, and the dancing destroyed it, and the toenail had to be permanently removed. The tender skin below made dancing on pointe extremely painful. So I switched from primarily doing ballet, to primarily doing modern dance – as modern dance is done barefoot.

This led me to start dancing at the private modern dance school in town called “3’s Company & Dancers.” It looks like “3’s Company” is now defunct, but the artistic director is now a professor of dance at UCSD: http://theatre.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/JeanIsaacs/

But, most fortunately, my pursuit of affordable modern dance classes led me to the local university: San Diego State University (SDSU) which was known for its excellent modern dance program. I danced there for a few years, and just loved my modern dance professor, Melissa Nunn, whose style of dance was wild and free and liberating and it was just a pure, pure joy to dance her choreography!

She is the one who wrote me this letter of recommendation.

Here are some programs and a scholarship letter from these years.

SDSU Spring Dance Concert 1988

3’s Company Scholarship Award

3’s Company Performance 1988 (my name is upside down at the top left)

Fortunately, my lost toenail led me to SDSU. Where in addition to taking multitudinous dance classes, I also took a physics course. I discovered I was much more talented in Physics than I was in anything else! And that is when I decided I could win myself a full scholarship, tuition, room and board, books, a stipend, everything, to a good school so long as I majored in Physics. I just needed to take the SATs! I was too poor in high school to pay the fee to take the SATs…

So, the next chapter in my life is UCSB, the University of California, Santa Barbara.

My last dance performance was at UCSB: